Lawnmower Boy

The Floridaness of this story ought to have been in the headline.  As a warning to the rest of us.

https://imgur.com/5udmQvq. 
 
https://imgur.com/5udmQvq

I got a dog that used to belong to a blacksmith.
As soon as I got him home, he made a bolt for the door.

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy.
 
But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. 
 
Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. 
 
If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"?
 
The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable.
 
When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. 
 
So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. 
 
Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this  isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the  native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. 
 
The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin. 

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy.
 
But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. 
 
Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. 
 
If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"?
 
The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable.
 
When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. 
 
So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. 
 
Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this  isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the  native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. 
 
The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin. 

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy.
 
But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. 
 
Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. 
 
If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"?
 
The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable.
 
When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. 
 
So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. 
 
Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this  isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the  native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. 
 
The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin. 

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy.
 
But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. 
 
Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. 
 
If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"?
 
The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable.
 
When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. 
 
So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. 
 
Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this  isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the  native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. 
 
The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin. 

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy.
 
But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. 
 
Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. 
 
If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"?
 
The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable.
 
When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. 
 
So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. 
 
Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this  isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the  native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. 
 
The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin. 

Ant-Man has been my surprise "Ooo I like this a lot more than I thought I would" of marvel heroes , so odds are I'll like it. But i do hope they don't go too dark on this one

Starting a new job tomorrow. Only a temporary position, but hopefully it will last until the end of the year.

Friday I will fall silent here for a bit more than a week.  Sept. 5 is our 30th anniversary, so we're taking a road trip up to Vancouver Island.  We've been there before, multiple times, but not in 15 years or so.

How much are tickets to watch that show?

I like the one in the upper left--"You would not believe the day I had."